Bird in Flight Prize ’18 finalist: City of Gardens

Elena Subach and Viacheslav Poliakov, Ukraine

“In 1940s, the workers of one of the mines in Katowice initiated gatherings in the regional House of Culture where they started to do paintings. It marked a shift in their mystical and spiritual practices which had little in common with plastic art. Later, they were known as the so-called ‘naïve artists of the Yaniv group’.”

Katowice is a city we have heard many legends about before coming to it. Not only the whole Poland, but the region alone constructs a myth about itself.

We are interested in the intersection of different perspectives here, for instance city branding and heroic epic of the difficult 1990s, propaganda and fashion, tradition of small provincial cities and globalization. What the city tells of itself — and what the city “shows”. The slogan of industrial Katowice is “The City of Gardens”.

The series consists of collages and direct shots. All photo materials were taken by us in 2018 on the territory of Silesian voivodeship.